Understanding categories and articles

From Joomla! Documentation

This article is a small, well-defined item that could be completed by someone with a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter and a modest time commitment. If you would like to try writing this article you're welcome to do so.

The subject may be self-evident, but if not then further details should be available on the discussion page. Please add {{inuse}} at the top of this page while editing. For other small, well-defined tasks, please look in the Cookie jar. ---Thank you.

This article is actively undergoing a major edit for a short while.As a courtesy, please do not edit this page while this message is displayed. The user who added this notice will be listed in the page history. This message is intended to help reduce edit conflicts; please remove it between editing sessions to allow others to edit the page. If this page has not been edited for several hours, please remove this template, or replace it with {{underconstruction}} or {{incomplete}}.

Intro

This short article will explain in detail what categories, sections and articles are all about.

First of all, let's make some simple differences. Sections and categories are non-content items, more specifically they help you organize your content the way you want it. The actual content is contained in articles.

Seeing the description above, you could be a little bit overwhelmed. You could think yourself "why should I organize my content using this scheme? Couldn't I just write articles and period?". The answer is yes, you could that, but think a little bit from the perspective of your site visitors. If you don't organize your content into sections and categories, the users will see a very long (and sometimes boring) list of articles that just "float" in thin air. If the content is categorized, a visitor may find it a lot more easy to navigate it.

An user-friendly website is not the only advantage. Breaking your content into sections and categories can help you organize and link to your

Sections

A section is a well designed part of your website. Generally, sections don't relate to each other (the only common point is the actual theme of the website) and they contain major topics. Let's see a short example.

Imagine a website about cars. As we can see, the theme of the website is quite a general one